Friday, October 19, 2012

'Revolution' and Aggressive Masculinity

Revolution
is like many other dystopian fantasies. Once again, we have White man
saves the world with people of colour in servant roles when they do
appear and of course,
the invisible gay canaries. By that I mean no gay people, because
somehow they are always the first ones to die when the world ends.
With the strong White male leader, normally we get a heavy dose of
hyper masculinity and the viewer is expected to accept the rightness of
an alpha male leader and embrace it. Consider for a moment Rick from The Walking Dead, and Tom Mason in Falling Skies. These two men both fit the mold for leadership that we have come to expect in a dystopian setting. Revolution
takes the mold and expands upon it to make hyper masculinity not only
the preserve of leadership but a necessary attribute of masculinity.From
the moment we meet Captain Tom Neville, he is savage and, in fact, a
sadist. He rides into Ben’s small community with armed men and demands
instant surrender on behalf of the militia. Tom uses violence and fear
to keep his troops in line and the only person he seems to fear is
Monroe. In episode five,
for the first time we get a little insight into Neville’s backstory. We
learn that Neville used to work as an insurance adjustor and lost his
job when he gave clients coverage for a fire that they hadn’t actually
paid for. In his boss's office, he was passive and his body language was
absolutely submissive, when he was fired. When Neville returns home, he tries to ask Rob, his neighbour to keep the noise level to a minimum but is ignored. Instead
of being active and pursuing a confrontation in both instances, Neville
enters his home and starts to take his frustrations out on a punching
bag. He tells his son, Jason, that it’s good to punch but he must never
punch people.This pre blackout Neville bears absolutely no resemblance
to the tough captain we have learned to be wary of. When Tom breaks into
his house looking for supplies, Neville beats him to death with his
bare hands and in this moment, Captain Tom Neville is born. It’s not
simply a case of the strong survive but a case that this is the
appropriate behaviour for a real
man. For Neville, a man protects his family, and a man shows power and
does not back down. He has learned that a passive masculinity has dire
repercussions and strips a man of his self worth.Passive
masculinity is also represented by Aaron. Pre black out, Aaron was an
extremely powerful man - not because of his physical strength but for his wealth. Though he was beat up in the school yard as a child, for Aaron, revenge came in
the form of a company with 300 employees, four homes and a private
plane. In episode three,
he expresses to Maggie the fear he feels in the world as it is today
because the same type of people who bullied him in the school yard, are
in power today. He calls it a joke, but clearly the loss of power and
value as a man is something that haunts Aaron. He is desperate to get
the power turned back on in the hope of returning to some semblance of
the former power structure. Men like Aaron are dependent upon others
for safety and he is barely functional with a weapon. His character
exists often as comic relief on the show. Ben
Matheson is another story of the failed passive man, a man moved more
by compassion and understanding than violence and aggression. In the very first episode
Ben is killed trying to placate the soldiers of the militia. Even had
Danny listened to him and put the crossbow down, Ben would have been taken
prisoner - we learn from Charlie’s rant in No Quarter,
that the militia had repeatedly come to their farm and demanded
resources, children, women - and every time Ben had given them up. Even
beyond being killed almost as soon as the show began, when we see Ben in
flashbacks we again see his passivity as a bad thing - in Chained Heatwe
see his wife, Rachel, killing to defend their meager supplies, while Ben
was willing to let them go and risk starvation. His passivity, his
compassion would have hampered his family's ability to survive.I
know that we have, in the past, criticised Charlie for being so naive
in a harsh dystopian world. In a world where the power is out, order has
dissolved and they live in such a harsh, brutal regime, Charlie is
ridiculously squeamish; she does expect things to be too neat and gentle
and good and she is overly outraged by the harshness around her. Her
refusal to tolerate the death of their enemies has often caused them
problems - with bounty hunters and militia free to follow them and put
them all at risk. Greater aggression, lower levels of compassion are an
asset for everyone in a dystopia like this, surely?Yet,
while we, as watchers, are deeply frustrated by Charlie’s naivety, the
show is not presenting it as a major disadvantage or even a flaw. If
anything, it’s presented as laudable - with Charlie’s willingness to
kill to save slaves making her a much better person than Miles’s
because of his willingness to kill to survive. When she spares Nate’s life - an act of
extreme naivety - it pays off in the end with him saving her life in Soul Train. Her compassion is an asset. When she is finally shown to be hardening, becoming less compassionate at the end of Soul Train, this is treated as something regrettable - even tragic. Her lost compassion is something to mourn.Compare
that with her brother Danny and his saving Captain Neville’s life. He
goes out of his way to compassionately save the Captain, the result of
which is that he is again captured and suffers continued abuse. Danny’s
compassion is a weakness, his growing hardness something that is past
time coming and to be celebrated.If
nothing else, Captain Neville’s own story, as mentioned above, shows
that this encouragement of aggression and punishment of compassion in
the male characters also applies to before the lights went out, before
the dystopia. While it was, ultimately, the dystopian that hardened
Neville, his passive, accommodating nature was presented as having
always been a weakness and a flaw, no matter the situation. We
cannot blame this praising aggression and contempt for compassion in
the male characters on the dystopia alone. There is a marked difference
between how female compassion and male compassion is presented on this
show and at no time is male compassion or passivity - even before the
dystopia - considered a laudable or powerful trait. The strong men, the
effective men, the men we’re supposed be impressed by are all
aggressive, dangerous, callous and violent. Those who are not are
punished, killed, exploited or weak.